Attack of the Black Widows.

You move into a new house, and are excited about the fact that you (hopefully) won’t experience the dead water heater, or the cracking foundation, or various other problems that crop up in older homes. However, you’re not immune to deadly critters.

I found the first black widow at Scatterbrain Central in the garage. It was nestled in the front-right corner of the garage. He had spun a web and was just hanging out near the sensor that detects whether the garage is clear to close. I thought, “hmm. A black, mean-looking spider. And what’s with that red on the belly? That looks familiar. Oh, wait, is that one of those spiders that can make my brains pop out of my eyeballs if it bites me?”

Yes, the black widow is particularly fond of my abode. I have since found a couple more, but yesterday killed four in one session, upon discovering that they are particularly fond of nestling themselves in our fence, beneath the top ledge, behind the fence posts. As you can imagine, we have many fence posts, and apparently each one is dying to have its own black widow companion. I grabbed my nearest copy of the Wall Street Journal, which triples as educational reading material, Miles’ favorite-run-from-the-newspaper-game, and black-widow-ass-whoopin’-dispenser.

So, over the past few weeks, I’ve gone from seeing a black widow in a zoo to seeing a handful at my house. Not good. At least none of those bastards have found their way inside – yet. This would be a pleasant consolation if it weren’t for the fact that on Wednesday night I killed a SCORPION that was crawling on the wall in the master bedroom. Mind you, again, I’ve never seen a scorpion outside of a zoo in Texas, and thought they only lived in the desert. How one made its way into my freaking house, I have no clue.

I’m thinking about putting a big box in the back yard and filling it with a ton of pest poison. I’ll poke a small hole in the box and label it “Super Fun House! Free Admission for Spiders, Scorpions, and Other Repugnant Pests Only.” That way they’ll think they’re in for some fun and they’re getting a good deal to boot. Do you think it’ll work?